How Trump's proposed budget could affect San Diego County

The White House asked the Congress to cut $3.6 trillion in government spending on healthcare and food assistance programs as they push ahead with tax cuts and trimming the deficit. Fred Katayama reports.

The White House asked the Congress to cut $3.6 trillion in government spending on healthcare and food assistance programs as they push ahead with tax cuts and trimming the deficit. Fred Katayama reports.

President Donald Trump’s full proposed budget for fiscal year 2018, released Tuesday, could have a major impact on some cornerstone segments of San Diego County. Here’s a look:

ENVIRONMENT

* This region is a world-renowned hub of climate change exploration, led by UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography but also joined by San Diego State University and the University of San Diego. The Trump administration aims to significantly reduce the budget for a prime funding source of such studies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The agency’s pot of money for climate research would drop by 19 percent to $128 million.

* The president wants to eliminate the National Estuarine Research Reserve System, a 28-site network that includes the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve.

* He also wants to do away with the nationwide Sea Grant program. California’s Sea Grant program, headquartered in San Diego, is the largest of the national system’s 33 locations. The program, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, works with university scientists and students to conduct research on fisheries and aquaculture.

* The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency faces an overall budget cut of 31.4 percent. The dozens of programs slated to be cut or downsized include one that works to restore polluted waterways and another that tries to improve environmental conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border, such as the ongoing problem of sewage spills that flow from Tijuana into the South Bay.

* EPA money for lead prevention and other anti-pollution efforts in low-income communities also would be slashed.

DEFENSE AND VETERANS

* The White House proposes $52.4 billion more in defense spending than last year, a prospect that would end sequestration’s restraining influence on military budgets in recent years.

* America’s troops would get a 2.1 percent raise, while civilians working for the U.S. Defense Department would receive a 1.4 percent pay bump.

* The Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force would grow slightly, with total military strength rising by 8,000 service members to a total of 2.13 million. The staffing increases would trickle down to local installations such as the San Diego Naval Base, Camp Pendleton and Miramar Marine Corps Air Station.

* Trump’s proposal calls for a national round of base closures and “realignments” in 2021, which would require the government to soon start analyzing possible installation cuts. As they’ve done during past rounds of base downsizing, local defense boosters such as the San Diego Military Advisory Council and the San Diego Regional Economic Development Council would likely kick into high gear to produce reports on why all of this area’s bases should be spared.

* The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs would see a 5.5 percent rise in its overall budget — including $2.9 billion in new funds for the Veterans Choice Program, which allows veterans in certain circumstances to get medical care from non-VA doctors. About one-quarter of a million veterans live in San Diego County.

SOCIAL SERVICES

* Many federal social services programs, from ones that help out infants to those that assist seniors, would see their budgets shrink. Some of these programs are administered at the county level. About one-third of the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency’s recommended budget for fiscal year 2017-18 would come from federal funds.

* The federal food-stamp system, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (CalFresh in California), would see a 29 percent reduction in its budget. About 300,000 people in San Diego County are enrolled in CalFresh.

* Trump’s budget calls for a 16.5 percent budget decline in Medicaid funding during the next decade. Roughly 4.9 million Californians were part of the program, which is called Medi-Cal in this state, last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than 750,000 of those people lived in San Diego County.

* The White House seeks more money for childhood-vaccination programs but less for prevention programs focused on HIV and sexually transmitted diseases.

* Health centers, often called community clinics, would see their funding increase slightly to $4.9 billion. But medical workforce training programs for diversity, primary-care medicine and dental and public health would be eliminated.

SCIENCES

* The San Diego region is consistently ranked as one of the nation’s top five life-science clusters.

* The National Institutes of Health, with its divisions handling everything from cancer to immunology to aging, is the nation’s predominant underwriter of biomedical research. Trump wants to cut the agency’s budget by $7.7 billion (a 22 percent reduction).

* Last year, the NIH provided about $850 million to more than 90 institutes in San Diego County. The biggest recipient was UC San Diego, which received $409 million.

* “It's a horrendous proposal. It’s completely unacceptable. It can’t be defended. ... Every way you look at it, it spells trouble,” said Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist-geneticist with the Scripps Health network and head of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla.

* The combination of Trump’s envisioned cuts to the NIH, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation would be devastating, said Joe Panetta, president and CEO of Biocom, the San Diego-based life science trade group for California. “This budget is taking us in the wrong direction,” Panetta said.

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT

* $75 million to add 75 immigration judges and support staff to bolster the nation’s immigration courts, which have a caseload of more than 500,000 pending cases.

* $7.2 million to add 70 assistant U.S. attorneys solely for immigration-law prosecutions. Some of these new employees, needed to keep pace with the expected increase in arrests of unauthorized immigrants at the border and in the interior of the U.S., would likely be added to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego. The budget also calls for adding 230 prosecutors nationwide to prosecute violent crime.

* $1.9 million to hire 15 lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Civil Division to handle “a growing caseload of challenges to the nation’s immigration laws, regulations, and policies” according to a fact sheet from the agency.

* $300 million to recruit, hire and train 500 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 1,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Those additional agents would be spread from San Diego to Florida.

* $1.5 billion for expanded detention, transportation and removal of unauthorized immigrants. This would expand the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention system, which currently has a capacity of about 40,000 people.

* $1.6 billion for new and replacement sections of a border wall between the United States and Mexico. This figure represents more of a down payment because Department of Homeland Security estimates a wall for the entire 1,933-mile border would cost $21.6 billion (some others’ calculations are higher.) Congress had already approved $20 million earlier this year for construction of border wall prototypes, which are slated to be built in late June near Otay Mesa.

EDUCATION

* Trump aims to save slightly more than $1 billion by scrapping the program that offers subsidized student loans.

* His proposal would drop the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which provides a financial incentive for university graduates to teach or take certain other jobs in rural areas of the United States.

* The president also hopes to eliminate federally backed after-school and teacher-training programs.

* His administration also seeks to increase funding for school-choice/voucher programs for low-income students.

* Pat Stall, director of the education school at Cal State San Marcos, said the budget blueprint could mean problems for both K-12 school districts and higher education. “The whole voucher system is basically funding private education,” she said. Noting that the proposed $4,000 voucher wouldn’t cover the average $10,000 per-year cost of a private school, Stall said it wouldn’t help under-represented and poor students, but families in higher economic brackets.

She added: “They’re cutting work-study programs, which a lot of our students at Cal State San Marcos really depend on to buy food to survive. It also cuts public service loan forgiveness that would help with advance course work. Our particular population in Cal State San Marcos is heavily dependent on student loans, and there’s already a huge problem across the country with student loan debt.”